Jonathan Wynne-Jones is the Religious Affairs and Media Correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph. He was described as "the scourge of church and state" at the Britsh Press Awards for 2009. He tweets @JonWynneJones.

Channel Four gives Christianity the Big Brother treatment

Channel Four did religion on Sunday night, giving a prime time slot to the first in a new series called Make Me a Christian.

Richard Dawkins got a much fairer hearing than Christianity from C4

The following night it devoted an hour to Richard Dawkins, author of the God Delusion, espousing the central messages of evolutionary theory in The Genius of Darwin.

If the titles of the two programmes weren't enough to make clear the different approach the programmes would take to religion and evolution – the former a confrontational challenge and the second a statement of praise – the different treatment soon becomes apparent.

In Make Me a Christian, four clerics are asked to try to convince a group of non-Christian volunteers that their lives would benefit from living by the teachings of the Bible.

What could have been a chance to provide a sympathetic exploration of Christianity is of course nothing of the sort – a lap-dancer, a Muslim, a lesbian and an atheist biker are among the volunteers and the lead cleric is the Reverend George Hargreaves, the leader of the right-wing Christian Party, who believes that the dragon on the Welsh flag is an evil symbol. Yeah, exactly.

Essentially this is Big Brother with a street-preacher thrown in for good measure.

The all too predictable result is another superficial examination of the distasteful nature of fundamentalist Christianity.

Its simplistic, sensationalist approach panders to those who believe religion is obsessed with sex and sin.

A positive model of what being a Christian would actually mean never gets heard amid all the shouting, with the didactic, arrogant and insensitive Hargreaves showing Christianity at its worst.

The softly-spoken Dawkins, on the other hand, comes across as articulate and persuasive as he offers the secularist's response to those who ask what would happen without religion.

"In this series I want to persuade you that evolution offers a far richer and more spectacular view of life than any religious story," he says.

This at least concedes to the viewer that what follows will be a proclamation of his atheistic, humanist view of life, delivered with evangelical zeal.

But as the presenter, he is able to preach his sermon without any real challenge, no matter how illogical his argument.

One such argument is his belief that all humans have a selfish gene, yet somehow rebel and overcome this in being kind and considerate to one another.

Rod Liddle exposed the weakness of this argument when he interviewed Dawkins in an article for the Spectator a couple of years ago, but the Channel Four programme lacked similar scrutiny.

Is it any wonder that church leaders are concerned secularism is pushing Christianity out of the public square when a mainstream channel's coverage of the two appears as biased as this?